Unless otherwise indicated herein, the approaches described in this section are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Virtualization allows the abstraction and pooling of hardware resources to support virtual machines in a Software-Defined Networking (SDN) environment, such as a Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC). For example, through server virtualization, virtual machines running different operating systems may be supported by the same physical machine (e.g., referred to as a “host”). Each virtual machine is generally provisioned with virtual resources to run an operating system and applications. The virtual resources may include central processing unit (CPU) resources, memory resources, storage resources, network resources, etc.
Through SDN, benefits similar to server virtualization may be derived for networking services. For example, logical overlay networks that are decoupled from the underlying physical network infrastructure may be provided. The logical overlay networks may be provisioned, changed, stored, deleted and restored programmatically without having to reconfigure the underlying physical hardware architecture, thereby improving network utilization and facilitating configuration automation. In practice, multicasting may be implemented in an SDN environment to support the distribution of information from one or more sources to a group of destinations simultaneously. However, multicast packets are generally treated as unknown unicast packets or broadcast packets in an SDN environment, which is inefficient and undesirable.